For the sixth straight weekend, hundreds of thousands of Koreans came out in Seoul (and with other Korean cities estimates approaching 2 million people on the streets) to demand the resignation of President Park Geun-hye. This Saturday December 3, the protests marched on the Presidential Blue House. The three opposition parties introduced a bill last week to impeach the President, supported by a majority of the parliament (171 of 300 members), for abuse of power in an influence-peddling scandal. But the vote needs a 2/3 majority and requires a rump of Park's Saenuri party to break and support the opposition to pass the bill.

These are the largest demonstrations in South Korea since the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s. But the street protests are also against the neoliberal reforms Park has pursued and the attacks on the KCTU (Korean Confederation of Trade Unions), and an emphatic statement that all politics is not forming in a populist hard right. The below essays were written just after the fourth demonstration weekend. read full story / add a comment

Community Health Workers led by the Gauteng Community Health Care Forum call on all CHWs, members of the communities, students, workers, and all who are committed to health care for all to join and support a march to the Gauteng Department of Health and the Legislature on the 8 November 2016!!read full story / add a comment

The elephant in the room is now visible to everyone. All the developments of the past years, from the extreme violence and cynicism of the “memoranda of understanding” imposed upon Greece to the decision of the British referendum in favour of Brexit, point to the same direction: the deep crisis of European Integration. It was supposed to be the most advanced example of economic and political integration and the first successful introduction of a single currency in such a broad area. It presented itself as a paragon of stability and human rights. Yet the reality is very different. read full story / add a comment

7 October 2016 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Many Western leaders claimed the invasion, dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom, was a humanitarian intervention to liberate Afghans and especially Afghan women and girls from the brutal Taliban regime. However, the evidence demonstrates the results have been anything but humane or liberating.

The people truly liberated by the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan are the wealthy investors in the military-industrial complex and those betting on successfully extracting Afghan resources and developing the infrastructure of the New Silk Road. read full story / add a comment

Since India embraced what trade unions call the LPG route to growth (that is liberalization, privatization and globalization) in 1991, the country has seen 16 general strikes. And the 17th all India workers’ strike falls on September 2nd. The last general strike, observed on 2 September 2015, saw participation from nearly 150 million workers – that's half the population of the entire U.S., or more than the combined population of the UK, Canada and Australia. This year, the unions expect a better turnout given the controversial labour policies pursued by the Narendra Modi-led NDA government. read full story / add a comment

Turkey's incursion into northern Syria on 24 August was flagged up as a move to drive the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) out of the border town of Jarabulus. But that is just a cover: Turkey's not very secret major objective is to crush the 50,000-strong Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Unit) militia, and overrun the three autonomous Kurdish dominated areas, collectively called “Rojava” by the Kurds. read full story / add a comment

France has ratcheted up its draconian repression of free speech about Palestine with the arrest of a woman for wearing a T-shirt supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. read full story / add a comment

This article is based on some of the research that I have conducted over the past two years on women’s activism in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan, from independence until the Arab uprisings. I collected over one hundred personal narratives from middle class women activists of different generations. This research was initially framed in terms of what is perceived to be a ‘gender paradox’: despite over a century of women’s activism, why do women in Arab countries continue to face some of the largest gender inequalities in the world? read full story / add a comment

The just-released Oxfam Davos report An Economy For the 1% which the mass media have ignored arrestingly shows that 62 individuals (388 in 2010) now own more wealth than 50 per cent of the world's population. More shockingly, it reports from its uncontested public sources that this share of wealth by half of the world's people has collapsed by over 40 per cent in just the last five years. read full story / add a comment

After the killing of Michael Brown in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in the late summer of 2014, protests erupted, and the Black Lives Matter spread across North America to protest police violence, too often systematically directed at poor and racialized communities. The massive police presence at these protests, with weapons and armoured vehicles that looked and felt like major military deployments, made it clear to all that something fundamental had taken place in policing practices and strategies. The intensification and extension of the coercive and security branches of the state was well-known since the declaration of the ‘war on terror’ in 2001, and the subsequent leaks of official documents by Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and others. The hardening of the state in its day-to-day operations at the most local levels could now be seen everywhere by all, in an increasing confrontation with the democratic rights of assembly and protest.

Lesley Wood's recent book, Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing (2014), locates these developments in a longer term perspective in relation to the spread of neoliberalism. Analyzing police agencies, strategies and practices from the mid-1990s to the present, she identifies a range of the structural and political forces that have led to the militarization of policing, particularly in North America, but also in trends that extend to Europe. This involves detailing a new matrix in the relations between the security, national police and defence apparatuses of the state with local police forces and the defence and security industries. Professional police associations and their various conferences and conventions have become important nodes for the spread of ‘best-practice policing’, in the form of kettling, barricading, infiltration and pre-emptive arrests, usage of new anti-protest weaponry, security screening, local intelligence-gathering capacities and the like. But also as sites where the case is made for an increase in police budgets, more capital intensification of policing and thus for accumulation by the ‘coercive’ industries (which define modern urbanism as much as the so-called ‘creative’ sector).

In a period of sharpening inequality, permanent neoliberal austerity, and hard right forces gaining ground, the logic for a further militarization of policing, securitizing of cities, and curtailing and limiting protests. In her book, Wood seeks not only to map these developments in North America through time, but also to expose the contradictions in the new forms of policing in capitalist states, and begin to pose how social and anti-capitalist movements will have to respond to ‘demilitarize our relations’.

The Paris Agreement has mostly been greeted with enthusiasm, though it contains at least one obvious flaw. Few seem to have noticed that the main tool mooted for keeping us within the 2℃ global warming target is a massive expansion of carbon trading, including offsetting, which allows the market exchange of credits between companies and nations to achieve an overall emissions reduction. That's despite plenty of evidence that markets haven't worked well enough, or quickly enough, to actually keep the planet safe.

The debate over whether to include carbon markets in the final agreement came right to the wire. Some left-leaning Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia vehemently opposed any mention, while the EU, Brazil, and New Zealand, among other countries, pushed hard for their inclusion – with support from the World Bank, the IMF and many business groups. read full story / add a comment

The current economic, political, and social situation in Venezuela is very complicated, which makes it somewhat difficult for outsiders to make sense of. On the one hand there are many people who defend the Bolivarian revolution, pointing to the successes it has had in reducing poverty and inequality and in increasing citizen participation and self-governance. On the other hand, there is a chorus of critics, not just from the usual suspects on the political right, but often from the left, who criticize the Maduro government's economic management of the country, corruption, the high inflation rate and shortages, and the trial of a high profile opposition politician, who the government accuses of fomenting violence. How did Venezuela get here? What happened since Hugo Chavez's death? Did the project derail, get stuck, hit a speed bump, or crash altogether? In order to answer this question, I will first analyze the origins of the current economic situation. read full story / add a comment

At least four guards involved in the tear gassing and other incidents of abuse while Dylan was in Don Dale are currently working as guards in the Darwin Correctional Centre and are continually tormenting Dylan. Some have threatened to have him bashed if he speaks out about his treatment.

At least four guards involved in the tear gassing and other incidents of abuse while Dylan was in Don Dale are currently working as guards in the Darwin Correctional Centre and are continually tormenting Dylan. Some have threatened to have him bashed if he speaks out about his treatment.